Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
The Changing Contact Center Workforce Requires Changing Technology Solutions
Keeping the contact center properly staffed has always been a challenge. Today, it’s even more of a challenge. Decades ago, people stayed in jobs a long time. They all worked under the same roof. They seldom worked while “on the road,” and if they did, they weren’t in regular communication. They were also typically all the same type of employee, particularly in the contact center: young workers marking time while waiting for something better.
Today’s contact center looks nothing like the contact center of 20 years ago. Workers might be anywhere: in the same room, in another office, across the country or on the other side of the world. Knowledge workers may be roaming and reachable by mobile devices. Some employees might be working from home. Increasingly, it’s also likely that workers will belong to a wide variety of demographic groups. For call center managers, this has complicated workforce management and scheduling greatly, according to a recent article by Chris Pentago writing for Business2Community.
“This [fragmentation] presents both many opportunities and challenges for HR managers,” he wrote. “They have the opportunity to hire talented staff from all over the world, which gives them access to a huge pool of qualified [workers]. However, managing workers remotely can be very difficult. Project managers must understand the technology at their disposal to oversee their remote staff effectively.”
Today’s workforce management and scheduling solutions can help solve the disparate workforce conundrum very well. Manual scheduling, which may have once been possible with a uniform workforce located all in one place, is no longer possible, particularly given the different skills many contact centers need to offer. More automated solutions can bring home-based workers into the fold, remain in touch with mobile workers, manage part-timers as necessary and provide alerts and notifications to managers automatically when problems crop up. Many of these solutions are also cloud-based, which can help immensely in availability, remote administration and keeping knowledge bases available to everyone who needs them.
“Smart managers understand the need to embrace the role technology plays in implementing effective workforce management solutions,” wrote Pentago. “They rely on cloud services and VoIP solutions for communicating between teams and storing in important documents.”
Some companies are solving the problem (they believe) by outsourcing to third party contact center services provider. While this may be smart in some cases, there’s no guarantee that the outsourcer has the kind of flexible cloud-based workforce management and scheduling solution in place that your company requires. Outsourcing companies are facing the same demographic and remote worker challenges, so they, too, need to be in the cloud. Before you choose an outsourcing partner, make sure that the company has updated its technology and can be as dynamic and flexible as you need it to be, particularly when it comes to the solutions that underpin the contact center.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi